A friend in need

HE was born into one of Hollywood’s most celebrated families. But in his last days, Chris Penn was still hustling for his big break, dreaming up a movie he could direct, writing the screenplay and building the set with his own hands. In his downtime, he’d while away the hours on his favorite perch -- a stool at the far end of the bar at Locando del Lago, an airy Italian restaurant on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

By early evening, his friend Phil Ursino, a cigar-smoking sometime actor with an old gold Lincoln, would often ferry the actor back to his Ocean Avenue condo packed with war props for his movie, a “Deer Hunter”-esque Vietnam film that he’d wanted to make for two decades.

He would work late into the night writing and fiddling with equipment. In the morning, friends said, he would load his truck with supplies and head up the coast to a canyon property owned by his more famous brother, Sean. Aided by a few day laborers, he would go to work constructing the set.

“He was sick with the flu, he was overweight, he was working all day and all night,” said one longtime friend, Don “The Dragon” Wilson. “I was worried he was burning the candle at both ends.” Wilson, a former kickboxing champion turned actor, tried to intervene. Penn brushed aside his offers to help.

Finally, at age 40, his heart gave out. His housekeeper found him dead in his bed on Jan. 24.

On Monday, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office ruled that he died of “cardiomyopathy,” compounded by the use of “multiple medications.” Few who knew him were surprised.

For years, even as he gained a certain cachet as a promising and underrated actor, Penn fought to overcome cocaine and alcohol abuse while packing on more and more weight.

As his life moved on the dual tracks of work and addiction, Penn remained a popular figure in Hollywood circles and outside the industry -- a very down-to-earth guy despite his family pedigree. Even so, he wanted to be doing better, sometimes pushing himself beyond his physical limitations. And now, in the wake of his death, some of his closest friends say they wish they could have done better by him.

“He’ll be missed,” Wilson said.

Wilson, who met Penn in 1984 when the actor was studying martial arts with a mutual friend, said Penn had been in rehab at least once. He kept a book on AA in his condo, said Wilson, who said he had once been Penn’s roommate. He would be fine for a while, Wilson said. And then something would trigger a relapse. Between 1987 and 2000, he racked up arrests for carrying a handgun, reckless driving, two DUIs and driving on a suspended license, according to court documents. His weight topped 300 pounds. In 1996, he told London reporter Ben Thompson of the Independent that he became addicted to drugs after the death of a baby he had fathered with a girlfriend.

“I started to play around with [drugs] a little bit and then I had a tragedy happen,” he told Thompson. “I lost a daughter -- she was only two days old, she was born premature and her lungs were just too weak -- and I went kind of overboard. I just used it as an excuse to do as many drugs as I could.

“It took me a year or so to figure out what I was doing, and by then I was completely addicted.”

Wilson said Penn also talked to him about the loss. “He tried to verbalize it to me a couple of times,” Wilson said. “It had a huge impact on his life. He was preparing to be a father, and all that was taken away from him in one tragic moment.”

He tried to get his life back on track through work. His late father, Leo, was a blacklisted actor-turned-TV director, and his mother, Eileen Ryan, is an actress with numerous television and movie credits. His oldest brother, Michael, became a musician and married singer Aimee Mann. And then there was Sean, an Oscar-winning actor who was once married to Madonna.

Going into show business seemed natural for Penn, who grew up making amateur movies at his family home near the beach in Malibu.

He made his debut in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish” in 1983. Then he played one of Tom Cruise’s pals in “All the Right Moves.” More roles quickly followed: He was the awkward kid taught to dance by Kevin Bacon in “Footloose”; he worked alongside brother Sean and Christopher Walken in “At Close Range”; and he played the dogged detective pursuing a star-crossed couple in Tony Scott’s “True Romance.”

Some believe, however, that he was most memorable as Nice Guy Eddie Cabot, alternately funny and deranged, in Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film, “Reservoir Dogs.”

As he became known as a strong character actor, Penn longed to be a leading man. He figured he had lost his chance because of his weight. “I’d never stop playing character roles, but I regret missing parts that I could have got if I’d been slim,” he told the Guardian in 1997.

And people would constantly ask him about his family. (One paper bluntly called him the “not-as-famous” Penn.) He took it in stride. “It doesn’t bother me,” Penn told one reporter. “When people say, ‘Are you Sean Penn’s brother?’ I say, ‘Yeah, he’s mine too.’ ”

Penn was hoping that the Vietnam movie, which he planned to produce and direct, would allow him to tell a story he thought was important. “It wasn’t something he thought was going to be a big moneymaker or a blockbuster,” Wilson said. “It was something close to his heart.”

Friend Beau H. Burton, who met Penn several years ago through Wilson, said he had agreed to help finance the project.

“I thought that this was really going to do something for him because he believed in it so strongly,” said Burton, who produced a yet-to-be-released movie called “Soft Target” featuring Wilson. “Penn was a very, very creative and talented person. He talked a lot about wanting to get his life and career back together. I was worried about him. I’ve had other friends die from being overweight.”

Two weeks ago, a number of A-list celebrities turned out for Penn’s funeral at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. There was Sean along with his actress wife, Robin Wright Penn, along with Jack Nicholson, James Gandolfini, Charlie Sheen and Tim Robbins, Wilson said.

(Afterward, Sean Penn and Mark Ruffalo, his costar in the upcoming “All the King’s Men,” had an altercation with a paparazzo at the cemetery, according to wire reports.)

Some of Chris Penn’s lesser-known friends, including a woman Penn had dated for two years, milled about in the crowd of celebrities too.

After the memorial service, a few of them stopped by Penn’s favorite hangout, Lago, a place where the actor was often the center of attention.

“It’s where he held court,” said friend Tony Morris, who runs a wildfire research network in Topanga Canyon. “He was curious about life and he was genuine.”

Ursino, who lives in a trailer park in Pacific Palisades, said that he and Penn would jokingly call each other “Skippy.” The thought of it made Ursino laugh.

“He was really a good-hearted guy and a really good friend,” Ursino said on a recent evening at a coffee shop a few steps from Locando del Lago. “I drive past his place and I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

Ursino described his friend as “sentimental.”

“He still talked about his dad, who died some years ago. He really loved his father a lot and he missed him.” Ursino said he was sitting outside the coffee shop on the evening of Jan. 24 when one of his friends called to say Penn had been found dead at his condo. “We all went over there,” Ursino said.

Penn’s friends immediately assumed he’d had a heart attack, because of his weight. “When I talked to him last, he said he was working to death trying to get things done on the set,” Burton said.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office confirmed that Chris Penn died of “nonspecific cardiomyopathy,” according to a statement. Penn’s heart was enlarged, weak and “could have given out at any time,” said coroner’s spokesman Craig Harvey.

Investigators also found that multiple medications were a “significant condition” contributing to Penn’s death. They particularly noted a commonly prescribed cough syrup, promethazine with codeine. No illegal drugs were found in his system.

By the end of his career, he had appeared in nearly 80 movies and television shows. Several movies are still to be released, including “Holly,” a film directed by Guy Moshe in which Penn plays the head of an Asian organized crime organization, and Damian Lee’s “King of Sorrow,” a love story about a suicidal psychiatrist and a drug-addicted homicidal cop.

Penn also had a cameo appearance in “The Darwin Awards,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival the day his death was announced.

The screening turned into a kind of tribute to the character actor, and to all he had done.

Beverly Camhe, a film and theatrical producer, was in the audience at the Eccles Theatre in Park City, Utah. Before the screening, she said, writer-director Finn Taylor told the capacity crowd of about 1,200 what a sad day it was and announced Penn’s death. When the credits rolled at the end of the movie, Camhe said, Penn’s name got a “huge ovation.”

After the screening, the director and some of the film’s stars, including Winona Ryder and Joseph Fiennes, took to the stage for a question-and-answer session.

“Winona, unsolicited, just stepped forward and said, ‘I want to tell you about my friend Chris Penn,’ ” said Camhe, “and she talked about what a wonderful man he was, how he didn’t have an ego, what a great, devoted friend he was. It was very moving.”

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Times staff writers Robin Abcarian, Susan King and Martha Groves contributed to this report.